All that irrational human behavior gets in the way.
Noah Smith
03 May 2018
A Lynching Memorial
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening Thursday in Montgomery, Ala., is dedicated to victims of white supremacy.
01 May 2018
30 April 2018
The real reason the Republican tax cut isn’t going to work
Now, the important thing to understand here is that profits are supposed to be like a bat-signal showing businesses where to invest. When they're high, it usually means that there's so little supply of what consumers demand that companies can charge almost anything for it. Other firms, then, should be able to swoop in and compete away some of these profits while still making enough themselves for their upfront costs — the investments they have to make — to be more than worth it. That's what's supposed to be the magic of the market: Just by having everyone pursue their own self-interest, we can figure out how much of everything we need better than any bureaucrat could.
But this process has lost some of its mojo recently. Corporate profits, adjusted for taxes, inventories, and depreciation, have hit an all-time high as a share of the economy the past 10 years, but business investment has not. Nowhere close. It has been average at best.
27 April 2018
26 April 2018
Trump is drowning in scandal. He can’t focus on Syria.
It is hard to imagine how Trump can do his job — for example, approving military strikes on Syria — while drowning in this rising tide of scandal. There is an old tradition, more honored in theory than fact, that issues of national security are kept separate from domestic politics, but Trump is utterly incapable of making any such distinction. For him, everything is political — and all politics is personal.”
“It’s hard to imagine that Trump, who in the best of times has the attention span of a hyperactive 8-year-old, can focus on strategy for Syria amid the far more pressing threats that he faces from an ever-expanding criminal investigation.
Max Boot
“It’s hard to imagine that Trump, who in the best of times has the attention span of a hyperactive 8-year-old, can focus on strategy for Syria amid the far more pressing threats that he faces from an ever-expanding criminal investigation.
Max Boot
25 April 2018
24 April 2018
23 April 2018
Democrats Shouldn’t Give in to White Racism
Too many observers treat American politics as a contest between rival groups of white people. It’s how you get dubious claims that Donald Trump broadly represents “working-class” voters, or the related narrative that pits a monolithic “coastal elite” against a so-called “heartland,” ideas that cannot survive contact with any consideration of black political behavior.
Jamelle Bouie
Jamelle Bouie
20 April 2018
19 April 2018
Tired of winning yet? You're not alone.
Trump doesn’t define winning the way you and I do. It’s not about giving back or improving people’s lives; as I’ve written before, Trump has never done that anywhere, unless you count remodeling a skating rink.
Winning, in Trump’s mind, wasn’t about us. It was about him.
It’s about ratings and primacy. Trump wants more than anything to exist outside of himself, to occupy your screens and your emotions. He always has.
Losing, to Trump, is receding from center stage. Winning is finding one way after another to keep us riveted to the show.
So Trump is absolutely delivering on his promise. He’s winning and winning and winning. Every day, it seems, he taps some new well of audacity, willing himself to become the overarching story of our time.
But you can’t really blame the president. He told us right from the start that we’d get tired of the whole noisy routine.
We were just too busy gawking to listen.
Matt Bai
Winning, in Trump’s mind, wasn’t about us. It was about him.
It’s about ratings and primacy. Trump wants more than anything to exist outside of himself, to occupy your screens and your emotions. He always has.
Losing, to Trump, is receding from center stage. Winning is finding one way after another to keep us riveted to the show.
So Trump is absolutely delivering on his promise. He’s winning and winning and winning. Every day, it seems, he taps some new well of audacity, willing himself to become the overarching story of our time.
But you can’t really blame the president. He told us right from the start that we’d get tired of the whole noisy routine.
We were just too busy gawking to listen.
Matt Bai
18 April 2018
Corruption, Not Russia, Is Trump’s Greatest Political Liability
It is hardly a coincidence that so many greedy people have filled the administration’s ranks. Trump’s ostentatious crudeness and misogyny are a kind of human-resources strategy. Radiating personal and professional sleaze lets him quickly and easily identify individuals who have any kind of public ethics and to sort them out. (James Comey’s accounts of his interactions with the president depict Trump probing for some vein of corruptibility in the FBI director; when he came up empty, he fired him.) Trump is legitimately excellent at cultivating an inner circle unburdened by legal or moral scruples. These are the only kind of people who want to work for Trump, and the only kind Trump wants to work for him.
Jonathan Chait
Jonathan Chait
17 April 2018
Trump-era politics is a surreal nightmare and we can’t wake up
Reality has confounded both expectations, with Trump displaying no hidden depths whatsoever, even as life continues to be basically fine for most people. America has its share of problems to be sure: sky-high child poverty rate, unsustainable greenhouse gas emissions, infrastructure woes, childcare woes, prescription drug affordability woes, you name it.
But these are basically longstanding issues that our political system writ large has failed to address. They don’t hold a particularly close relationship to the fact that the president is a racist buffoon who is possibly being blackmailed by the FSB over some sex tapes.
On the other hand, the fact that the president of the United States has literally nothing to say about any of the country’s most urgent long-term problems is itself a fairly noteworthy situation.
Matthew Yglesias
But these are basically longstanding issues that our political system writ large has failed to address. They don’t hold a particularly close relationship to the fact that the president is a racist buffoon who is possibly being blackmailed by the FSB over some sex tapes.
On the other hand, the fact that the president of the United States has literally nothing to say about any of the country’s most urgent long-term problems is itself a fairly noteworthy situation.
Matthew Yglesias
16 April 2018
It’s Time to Stop Yammering About Liberal Bias
The right has plenty of representation in the nation’s opinion pages.
This raises a few obvious questions that are, for whatever reason, rarely asked. If American institutions really were intolerably liberal in 1951 and in 1966, then what would a state of affairs that satisfied the conservative movement actually look like? If, as conservatives have insisted over decades of uninterrupted complaint, the American people really are being indoctrinated into liberalism in their formative years at our schools and colleges and in their adult years by an oppressively slanted press, how exactly does one explain the American political situation in 2018, with right-wing control of the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, 33 governorships, and 32 state legislatures? If America’s citizenry really has been spoon-fed leftist propaganda for nearly 70 straight years, isn’t the reorganization of the United States into semiautonomous workers’ republics long overdue?
Osita Nwanevu
This raises a few obvious questions that are, for whatever reason, rarely asked. If American institutions really were intolerably liberal in 1951 and in 1966, then what would a state of affairs that satisfied the conservative movement actually look like? If, as conservatives have insisted over decades of uninterrupted complaint, the American people really are being indoctrinated into liberalism in their formative years at our schools and colleges and in their adult years by an oppressively slanted press, how exactly does one explain the American political situation in 2018, with right-wing control of the presidency, the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, 33 governorships, and 32 state legislatures? If America’s citizenry really has been spoon-fed leftist propaganda for nearly 70 straight years, isn’t the reorganization of the United States into semiautonomous workers’ republics long overdue?
Osita Nwanevu
13 April 2018
Why Would the Atlantic Hire Kevin Williamson?
Describing a 2014 visit to the impoverished city of East St. Louis, Illinois, Williamson compared a black child to a “primate” and a “three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg” before likening his own trip through Illinois to Marlow’s journey up the Congo River in Heart of Darkness, all within the space of a single paragraph.
Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann
Who Made the Worst Decision of the Iraq War?
On May 15, 2003, one day after he arrived in Baghdad to head the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer issued CPA Order No. 1, which barred members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from all but the lowliest government posts. The next day, he issued CPA Order No. 2, which disbanded the Iraqi army.
With those two orders, the future of Iraq was doomed, the already-likely failure of the American mission was sealed, and the prospect of a sectarian civil war—enveloping not only Iraq but the entire Middle East—became nearly inevitable. Not only did the orders remove the country’s two main indigenous institutions of authority, they also put 50,000 civil servants and a quarter-million soldiers out of a job, many of them with access to weapons. In other words, Bremer’s orders amounted to a recipe for resentment, anarchy, and violence.
Fred Kaplan
With those two orders, the future of Iraq was doomed, the already-likely failure of the American mission was sealed, and the prospect of a sectarian civil war—enveloping not only Iraq but the entire Middle East—became nearly inevitable. Not only did the orders remove the country’s two main indigenous institutions of authority, they also put 50,000 civil servants and a quarter-million soldiers out of a job, many of them with access to weapons. In other words, Bremer’s orders amounted to a recipe for resentment, anarchy, and violence.
Fred Kaplan
12 April 2018
11 April 2018
Make Them Pay
Gun control activists must focus on fighting for the right to sue firearms manufacturers.
Cars became more crashworthy, and hence less lethal and injurious, as a result of tort litigation and federal regulation. Cars are instrumentalities of death and injury, not because producers and purchasers intend this, but because cars are involved in crashes and crashes cause death and injury. Similarly, most of the people who buy guns do not intend to use them for suicide or homicide, but these outcomes can be expected when guns are in use. In the case of automobiles, the law tracks the recognition that cars can be designed and marketed so as to enhance crashworthiness. Damage awards and regulatory penalties have motivated automobile manufacturers to improve crashworthiness and to promote crashworthiness as a desirable feature. Over time, this has yielded major reductions in the rates of fatality and injury from car use.
Heidi Li Feldman
Cars became more crashworthy, and hence less lethal and injurious, as a result of tort litigation and federal regulation. Cars are instrumentalities of death and injury, not because producers and purchasers intend this, but because cars are involved in crashes and crashes cause death and injury. Similarly, most of the people who buy guns do not intend to use them for suicide or homicide, but these outcomes can be expected when guns are in use. In the case of automobiles, the law tracks the recognition that cars can be designed and marketed so as to enhance crashworthiness. Damage awards and regulatory penalties have motivated automobile manufacturers to improve crashworthiness and to promote crashworthiness as a desirable feature. Over time, this has yielded major reductions in the rates of fatality and injury from car use.
Heidi Li Feldman
10 April 2018
John Bolton and Gina Haspel Are the Consequences of Our Failure to Reckon With the Bush Years
Americans have been able to comfort themselves over the last 15 years with the notion that the war was a “blunder” or “mistake” rather than an immoral act or crime. (Though, as my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley noted, 43 percent of Americans, like Bolton, don’t even think it was a mistake.) Certainly, the central architects and advocates of the war have paid little professional price for its consequences.
Joshua Keating
Joshua Keating
It’s Time to Panic Now
John Bolton’s appointment as national security adviser puts us on a path to war.
His agenda is not “peace through strength,” the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that label—i.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.
Fred Kaplan
His agenda is not “peace through strength,” the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that label—i.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.
Fred Kaplan
09 April 2018
No Strength, No Peace
Trump is the Willy Loman of foreign policy. He thinks, as does the tragic traveling salesman of Arthur Miller’s play, that “personality always wins the day” and “a smile and a shoeshine” are more important than having something to sell that customers want.
Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan
Mick Mulvaney’s Latest Scandal Makes Him Look Like a Craven Hypocrite
This weird and wonky scandal shows how far the administration is willing to go to downplay unflattering data and push through a regulation that will likely hurt working class Americans.
Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann
06 April 2018
Celebrating 50 years of the Chrystie Street Connection
On November 27th, 1967 there was chaos on the New York City subway. That Monday, as strap-hangers began their daily commute, many of them found that trains they had taken every day for years, decades even, were no longer running or were running to new places.
Vanshnookenraggen
Vanshnookenraggen
The myth of “forcing people out of their cars”
At the same time, parking takes up land. And in some parts of the country (California certainly included), land is expensive, so paying the full price of a parking space might get expensive. The question is whether towns should require that new developments come with a certain minimum amount of new parking attached (as virtually every city, including New York City, currently does) or whether they should simply allow people to decide how much parking they want to pay for.
Matthew Yglesias
Matthew Yglesias
05 April 2018
A Prefabricated Tragedy
The collapse of a superbridge in Florida shows how an entire philosophy of building can go wrong.
Matthew N. Eisler
Matthew N. Eisler
04 April 2018
The Artifice of the Deal
Forget the standard photo ops; his entire presidency, save for a giveaway-laden tax bill that actually originated in Congress, is a string of dramatic flourishes, without even the aspiration to translate them into something like actual governance.
Trump was dead right about our politics over the years — too much of it became a tired kind of stagecraft. But that kind of stagecraft was almost always designed to sell an agenda.
02 April 2018
Trump wants to liberalize health data. Easier said than done.
The hardest part of liberalizing patient data is that you have hundreds of thousands of hospitals and doctor offices all across the country who have a financial interest in keeping data private. If a patient can take her record from Hospital A and walk down the street to Hospital B to seek treatment, that’s bad for Hospital A’s bottom line.
Sarah Kliff
Sarah Kliff
30 March 2018
Was the Poisoning of a Former Russian Spy a Chemical Weapons Attack?
The open—and very difficult to answer—question of whether Moscow ordered the hit or merely lost possession of the nerve agent leaves London a bit of wiggle room in how it responds, but not much.
Joshua Keating
Joshua Keating
Trump’s VA Is Purging Civil Servants
A bipartisan law was supposed to make it easier to fire bad actors at the Department of Veterans Affairs. But it’s targeting the wrong people.
Isaac Arnsdorf
Isaac Arnsdorf
28 March 2018
Trump’s Perversion
But the worst thing about Trump’s perverse treatment of friends and enemies isn’t that he punishes our allies.
Congratulations, Mr. President. You’ve one-upped Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama. You’ve humiliated our allies, renounced human rights, and snagged a photo-op with the head of the world’s most repressive state. You win.
William Saletan
Congratulations, Mr. President. You’ve one-upped Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama. You’ve humiliated our allies, renounced human rights, and snagged a photo-op with the head of the world’s most repressive state. You win.
William Saletan
27 March 2018
Martin Shkreli Is Going to Jail and I Can’t Even Bring Myself to Enjoy It
That sums up a lot about the state of U.S. capitalism and law. It’s perfectly kosher to milk grotesque profits from old, life-saving medications. But playing games with a relatively small amount of investors’ cash can get you put away for the better part of a decade.
Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann
Summit Surprise
A meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un could be a major opportunity—if Trump actually prepares for it.
If Trump wants this meeting to accomplish anything of value, he needs to do the following:
First, appoint an envoy to South Korea. (It is amazing that, more than a year into his term, he has yet to do this.)
Second, have his staff bring in the experts on Korea. Swallow hard if this means letting in the occasional Democrat.
Third (and this is a directive more for Trump’s advisers), do not let this meeting take place in Pyongyang. Kim would put on the most extravagant show in the history of the world, and Trump would be so impressed by the welcome that he’d likely embrace the “Hermit King” as his new best friend and concede who knows what at the bargaining table. The meeting should be held in the most boring neutral city in the world.
Fourth (a related point), Trump should not be allowed to meet with Kim all alone. At least one senior aide should be in the room along with a note taker and a State Department translator.
Fifth, the National Security Council should draw up a list of goals—three things, say, that Trump should try to get from this meeting, three things that he’d be willing to offer in exchange for a true pledge to freeze or dismantle the nukes, and three things that the North Koreans are likely to push for but that Trump should reject at all cost.
Fred Kaplan
If Trump wants this meeting to accomplish anything of value, he needs to do the following:
First, appoint an envoy to South Korea. (It is amazing that, more than a year into his term, he has yet to do this.)
Second, have his staff bring in the experts on Korea. Swallow hard if this means letting in the occasional Democrat.
Third (and this is a directive more for Trump’s advisers), do not let this meeting take place in Pyongyang. Kim would put on the most extravagant show in the history of the world, and Trump would be so impressed by the welcome that he’d likely embrace the “Hermit King” as his new best friend and concede who knows what at the bargaining table. The meeting should be held in the most boring neutral city in the world.
Fourth (a related point), Trump should not be allowed to meet with Kim all alone. At least one senior aide should be in the room along with a note taker and a State Department translator.
Fifth, the National Security Council should draw up a list of goals—three things, say, that Trump should try to get from this meeting, three things that he’d be willing to offer in exchange for a true pledge to freeze or dismantle the nukes, and three things that the North Koreans are likely to push for but that Trump should reject at all cost.
Fred Kaplan
26 March 2018
23 March 2018
22 March 2018
Why Isn’t Trump President for Life Yet?
He is following the same playbook as other authoritarian populists around the world. He’s just bad at it—so far.
Yascha Mounk
Yascha Mounk
There Is Not a Single Good Reason to Deregulate Banks Right Now. Democrats Are Helping It Happen Anyway.
If Dodd-Frank was truly throttling the banking system with red tape, though, you would expect to see some signs that Americans were having trouble borrowing. But there simply aren't any.
Jordan Weissmann
Jordan Weissmann
21 March 2018
It’s not just Gary Cohn. Trump’s White House is in a staffing crisis.
The Trump administration is losing its bench even faster than it’s losing its principals.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein
20 March 2018
Blacks Were Enslaved Well into the 1960s
More than 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, there were black people in the Deep South who had no idea they were free. These people were forced to work, violently tortured, and raped.
19 March 2018
What Donald Trump understands about conservatism
People who aren’t conservative often fail to realize this, but conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something. It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner. The loss may be as material as money or as ethereal as a sense of standing. It may be a loss of something that was never legitimately owned in the first place; it may, when compared with what the conservative retains, be small. Even so, it is a loss, and nothing is ever so cherished as that which we no longer possess.
Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein
16 March 2018
Uber May Have Imposed 12-Hour Driving Limits, but It’s Still Pushing Drivers in Other Troubling Ways
The new policies from ride-hail apps seem more about dodging liability than ensuring safety.
Alex Rosenblat
Alex Rosenblat
15 March 2018
14 March 2018
13 March 2018
Trump Comments Show Disdain for the Rule of Law
It doesn’t seem like an exaggeration to say that some Republican members of Congress would have called for Barack Obama’s impeachment if he had ever called for taking people’s guns away without due process.
James Hohmann
James Hohmann
12 March 2018
Cop Stoppers
How did the NRA become an enemy of law enforcement?
Millions of decent people pay dues every year to sustain the NRA. They think they’re supporting law and order. What they’re really supporting is the nation’s most effective anti-police lobby.
William Saletan
Millions of decent people pay dues every year to sustain the NRA. They think they’re supporting law and order. What they’re really supporting is the nation’s most effective anti-police lobby.
William Saletan
09 March 2018
The next big bad bet might be lurking on Wall Street — and we just got a glimpse of it
Investors banking on market calm just got burned on a bet many didn’t entirely understand they were making.
Emily Stewart
Emily Stewart
08 March 2018
07 March 2018
06 March 2018
The New Graveyard of Empires?
Vladimir Putin’s grand ambitions for Syria aren’t working out quite as planned.
In Syria, the Russians are making a better show of things than we are. In part that’s because we’re pursuing lots of interests (with varying degrees of enthusiasm), many of them mutually exclusive, while the Russians are focused on just one. We want to crush ISIS, help the Kurds, placate Turkey, contain Iran, keep Iraq from falling apart, and reach a political settlement that eases President Bashar al-Assad out of power. These are all worthy goals, but it’s impossible to achieve any one or two of them without torpedoing the others.
Fred Kaplan
In Syria, the Russians are making a better show of things than we are. In part that’s because we’re pursuing lots of interests (with varying degrees of enthusiasm), many of them mutually exclusive, while the Russians are focused on just one. We want to crush ISIS, help the Kurds, placate Turkey, contain Iran, keep Iraq from falling apart, and reach a political settlement that eases President Bashar al-Assad out of power. These are all worthy goals, but it’s impossible to achieve any one or two of them without torpedoing the others.
Fred Kaplan
05 March 2018
Heritage of Hate
It’s worth remembering that countless black Americans were lynched, captured, beaten, hosed, tortured, and terrorized with either the overt support or the deliberate indifference of “the people’s protectors” over the course of American history. During most of the time “since our founding,” local law enforcement has played the role of an oppressive force against black Americans, rather than a protective one.
Daniel Horwitz
Daniel Horwitz
02 March 2018
01 March 2018
28 February 2018
Fiscal Policy and the Price-Level
This post is me thinking out loud about how fiscal considerations may influence the price-level.
David Andolfatto
David Andolfatto
27 February 2018
Mattis Goes Nuclear
As someone who has studied the nuclear world for 40 years and has interviewed hundreds of its denizens for a book and many articles, I have learned this: When it comes to nuclear strategy, there is no reality. The weapons are real, and their destructive power is cataclysmic. But the countless attempts to harness this destruction into an elaborate war-fighting strategy are excursions into metaphysics, not the hard-boiled realism that its purveyors like to believe.
26 February 2018
The robots v. robots trading that has hijacked the stock market
Why is it that when the market is climbing by improbable leaps and bounds month after month, that we are supposed to take that as a genuine reflection of the fundamentals, but when the market is in a free fall, we are supposed to write that off as momentary fits of irrationality?
The truth is that the market is just as irrational and divorced from fundamentals on the way up as it is on the way down. It is in the nature of markets more so today than ever, thanks to the computerized high-frequency trading strategies of the Wall Street wise guys. What we've watched this week is herd behavior on steroids.
In truth, there is no reason that a financial system has to be this complex and so volatile. There is no reason that it has to divert so much of the country's talent and capital, and to siphon off so much for traders and bankers and hedge fund managers. With a bit of intelligent regulation, we could have a financial system that is simpler, less risky, less expensive and less susceptible to manipulation.
There is a cost to the kind of financial "innovation" that produces instruments like the Velocity Shares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term Exchange-Traded Note. And my guess is that those costs now greatly exceed the benefits.
Steven Pearlstein
The truth is that the market is just as irrational and divorced from fundamentals on the way up as it is on the way down. It is in the nature of markets more so today than ever, thanks to the computerized high-frequency trading strategies of the Wall Street wise guys. What we've watched this week is herd behavior on steroids.
In truth, there is no reason that a financial system has to be this complex and so volatile. There is no reason that it has to divert so much of the country's talent and capital, and to siphon off so much for traders and bankers and hedge fund managers. With a bit of intelligent regulation, we could have a financial system that is simpler, less risky, less expensive and less susceptible to manipulation.
There is a cost to the kind of financial "innovation" that produces instruments like the Velocity Shares Daily Inverse VIX Short-Term Exchange-Traded Note. And my guess is that those costs now greatly exceed the benefits.
Steven Pearlstein
23 February 2018
Don’t kid yourself. The future is bleak.
Democracy is really a prisoner's dilemma, and we're losing at ours.
The only way democracies stop being so polarized is after some kind of catastrophe — a catastrophe that more often than not is brought on by, yes, polarization. Indeed, the two most optimistic examples that Levitsky and Ziblatt can come up with are the way Chile's parties from across the ideological spectrum were eventually able to set aside their rather substantial differences to support democracy in the years after Augusto Pinochet's coup and how German conservatives managed to overcome their traditional Catholic-Protestant divide to do the same in the wake of World War II. Remember, the fact that democracy can come back after a dictatorship is supposed to be the good news here.
Matt O'Brien
The only way democracies stop being so polarized is after some kind of catastrophe — a catastrophe that more often than not is brought on by, yes, polarization. Indeed, the two most optimistic examples that Levitsky and Ziblatt can come up with are the way Chile's parties from across the ideological spectrum were eventually able to set aside their rather substantial differences to support democracy in the years after Augusto Pinochet's coup and how German conservatives managed to overcome their traditional Catholic-Protestant divide to do the same in the wake of World War II. Remember, the fact that democracy can come back after a dictatorship is supposed to be the good news here.
Matt O'Brien
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